A sobering coincidence

So there I was with a handful of friends last night, having retired to a pub for a quiet couple of pints so as to give our ears a rest from the punishing but compelling onslaught of a bewildering variety of sounds and noises. Oddly, the conversation turned - I don't quite remember how - to discussion about World War 1 (possibly because I very boringly seize any chance to discuss the war when I've had a few drinkies).

I recall talking about my admiration for Harry Patch's simple but cogent denunciations of armed conflict, and how much extra weight and authority it seemed to carry coming from someone - the last one alive - who had been there, seen so much horror and futility with his own eyes, and very luckily lived to tell the tale so many decades later.

So it was rather sobering to get home around 1am and to see the news headlines.

The potential for devastation

It was on my mind all day. Not necessarily at the forefront, but certain triggers would bring it right back into sharp, tense focus.

Waiting for news: not wanting to phone but wanting to know, being sure that the phone call would come eventually.

The sometimes unbearable bliss of ignorance in the meantime, and the occasional moment of actual forgetting.

The forgetting is the worst, I remember vividly the times when I would forget that my father was terminally ill: you can't hold these things in your mind all the time - not if you want to retain at least some sanity - yet I would feel bad upon realising that I had experienced moments, however brief or long, of having forgotten.

(How dare I forget?)

Today I was forcefully reminded just what a tapestry can form in one's mind during the waiting: a multitude of potential outcomes. Not daring to hope that things might be ok. Yet also being aware that what for me was still a potential outcome was already an actuality, albeit one I didn't know as yet.

I made sure I ate something as soon as I got home, just in case the news, when it came, might render my appetite redundant for the foreseeable future. I sat in the "now" of the moment, wondering whether this "now" might also come to form a significant sense of "before."

The phone rang.

My heart, oddly enough, didn't leap into my throat. I was calm.

So was my mother.

Things are ok, at least for now, thank goodness. The subtle yet palpable charge in these moments, that electricity, I wish I could harness it somehow, to use that energy to propel so many things forward and onward.

Yet it seems to me - rightly or wrongly - that such electricity is only generated in these painful, special moments of waiting.



The rain has eased, outside is calm too: I'm sat quietly in the half-light of the evening.

What preceded the beauty

There's a glut of writings about the 65th D-Day anniversary, of course there is. Many poignant photographs too, of aged gentlemen in their uniforms stood on the beaches at Normandy, alone in their thoughts. One can only wonder.

I feel fortunate to have read this article, it manages to strike a fine balance between the business of the anniversary, and the drama of the landings themselves. The paragraphs in particular detailing what happened to many as they landed on the beaches - beginning at the third paragraph - I found to be incredibly affecting.

Format

Most of the stuff I have on vinyl I don't often listen to these days, but I can easily find it on youtube. This one being a case in point.

Personally I recommend ignoring the visuals: not that I'm implying criticism of them, it's just I've always known the audio in isolation. It's more than evocative enough to conjure up its own images, because the sounds are just beautiful, exceptionally so.